Category: Tools

Some more friction reducers from Marc to investigate.

MessageSave and EZDetach make mail management a lot easier.

Reading some of the e-mail questions I receive from readers and scanning through some of the older posts on the Getting Things Done forum, it appears that many people are struggling with two problems related to Outlook e-mail

• How to save e-mail for archival purposes (say, on a CD), to improve Outlook performance, and/or reduce the server space used by IMAP or Exchange servers.
• How to manage attachments to e-mails when archiving

An elegant solution for Outlook users comes in the form of a pair of small add-ins for Outlook from TechHit – MessageSave and EZDetach. These add-ins are available as two new buttons on the Outllok toolbar and provide a number of ways to quickly process your accumulated mail and define rules for new incoming messages.

MessageSave gives you the ability to save e-mail messages as either native Outlook e-mail files (.msg) or plain text (.txt) files. You can save individual messages or process an entire hierarchy of folders at once. A wide range of options are available fo adding data points to the saved file names including date received, sender, etc. This makes sorting the output folder contents a lot easier.

There are advantages to saving in both formats, of course. Text files are a lot smaller than native Outlook messages. Saving in native format preserves formatting and makes reintegration into Outlook darg-and-drop simple (if you choose to delete the messages from your .pst file or Exchange folder after saving them).

I was able to reduce my personal .pst file from 95 MB to under 20 MB by saving all my older messages to a folder on my hard drive. MessageSave preserves the folder hierarchy (optional) so my very idiosyncratic filing system is unaltered. And, because Lookout, which has become an indispensable part of my Outlook setup, can index and search file folders, my ability to find whatever I’m looking for is preserved.

EZDetach provides a nice solution to the problems associated with storing attachmnts to e-mails in your .pst or Excahnge files. You can save the attachments to a local folder (or network share) and maintain a link to that file in the e-mail message. This obviously saves space equal to the size of the attachment while maintaining the association betwee a message and an attachment. When saving the files, you can have an exact copy of your Outlook folder structure created and attachments can be inserted back into messages when you forward them. You can even reestablish the link if you move the file after detaching it.

Both of the tools are quick to install and easy to use. EZDetach costs $18.95 and MessageSave runs $24.95.

[Marc’s Outlook on Productivity]

Just got around to adding Feedster search over in the right hand column here.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU: SEARCH BAR NOW WORKING.

Thanks to some help from my brilliant friend in Scotland, Aalia Wayfare at The LeftHander (who previously fixed the gap in the middle column of my permalink pages), the “SEARCH SITE” bar in the upper right corner of my blog is now working. Instead of using Google, this bar now uses Feedster’s search engine. From the testing I have done, not only does it pick up all references to keywords anywhere in my archives, it also updates every day, so you can even use it to find references on my seven-day home page and category pages. BTW, Aalia has just ponied up for a Salon Blog.I’m still hoping that Google will get around to re-crawling all my pages, which should up my hit count by about 400 hits per day, and help people who rely on that search engine to find my site. I’d like to thank these wonderful people for helping me revamp my blog to make it easier for Google to crawl, and for readers with slow connection speeds to use: In addition to Aalia (who has also fixed my metatags): fellow Slogger Philip Vassar at Just Playing, Arve Bersvendsen at Virtuelvis , the blogless Ken Hirsch at No Pundit Intended, and Seth Finkelstein at Infothought, as well as Radio’s intrepid Lawrence Lee at Tomalak’s Realm. These guys are wonderful, selflessly helpful, and persistent and knowledgeable about all things technical. Thanks, guys! In the meantime, if you’re one of those unhappy with Google’s unpredictable behaviour, you can add a Feedster search bar to your own site by going here.

[How to Save the World]

And I have no qualms about piggybacking on top of Scoble’s work.

75 top security tools.

What kind of stuff do I read in my feeds? Well, I see there’s a list of the 75 top security tools. Now, why do I link to those here? So that when I need them, I’ll be able to find them in Google.

Thanks to Alex Moskalyuk’s feed for bringing that one to me.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

I’m beginning to think through whether it’s time to redesign the toolset and processes I use to blog. This looks like it will provide some useful input.

Jeff moves to Das Blog.

My mentor and co-worker Jeff Sandquist moved his weblog from Radio UserLand to Clemens Vasters’ “Das Blog” (which was written in .NET) over the weekend and writes about the experience.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Looks like a tool worth taking time to look at. It’s in the queue.

snipsnap: wow.

A few days ago I was asking on #mobitopia what people preferred as a wiki/weblog system and someone (I think it was csete) mentioned SnipSnap. I didn’t have time to try it out until today. My comments: WOW.

It took me literally five minutes to set up. It seamlessly connected to the local mysql installation (all I had to do was create a db and a user for it) and ran under my Tomcat/Apache config. After setting a couple of options I was on my way. It combines the idea of Wikis (easily creating links to pages) to the format/structure/features of a weblog. The “wikiness” of snipsnap does not extend to requiring WikiWords, which is, as far as I’m concerned, a relief. WikiWords inevitable end up requiring weird names for links.

It’s a java app, so it runs everywhere. The only potential problem I could find is that in edit mode there are tons of options to edit content and sometimes it can be confusing (or rather, a little overwhelming), but I get the impression that it wouldn’t be hard to get used to it.

If you’re looking for a weblog/wiki solution in Java that it’s easy to get started with, SnipSnap is definitely worth checking out.

[d2r]

Given my general ignorance of IIS, SqlServer, and .NET I have yet to be able to get this to actually work in my environment. I’m sure I have something obvious misconfigured but I don’t know enough to figure out what and I haven’t had a lot of time to do the poking around that will ultimately lead me to getting it figured out.

Awesome web based application development tracker and cheap to boot..

For those of you looking for a way to track feature requests, bugs, tasks, and time lines to a lesser extent, and you don’t want to spend an arm and a leg look no further than Gemini from Countersoft. It’s only about $95 dollars US, depending on what the dollars is worth compared to the pound at the time of purchase, and if you limit it to 15 users or less and don’t put it on a public webserver it’s free!

It’s helping me become alot more organized. I can’t recommend it enough.

[SQLTeam.com Weblogs]

I’m having some internal software problems with “Radio”. The simplest solution looks to be a reinstall. It’s possible that will lead to some breakage, so I wanted to give both my readers a heads up. I believe that one side-effect of reinstalling is that Radio may choose to republish the entire 2+ years worth of posts here and that might cause some odd trackback pings to long ago posts.

Capster: run a program at startup.

Here’s a cool tool. Capster lets you run a program at startup, but only when the Caps Lock key is on. One of the things I’ve always wanted in Windows is a Startup Manager like the Mac OS offered (in Classic Mac OS 9 and earlier). This 5K program is a partial solution.

For example, I run ZoneAlarm when I’m connected at home or out and about but don’t really need it when I’m connected at work. All I do is press Caps Lock when I boot up at home and ZoneAlarm launches.

Nice

[Marc’s Outlook on Productivity]

Another useful friction remover from Marc.

A fix for text-only links.

How many times have you seen a URL that wasn’t coded properly to be a clickable link? You have to highlight the text, copy, go to the address bar of your browser, paste, and hit Enter (or click “Go”). I just came across a neat script called BrowseTo (via Daily Rotation) that fixes this small but annoying problem.

Install BrowseTo and you can now highlight a text-only link, right click and choose Browse to… to open a new window containing that page. You can even use it to highlight a clickable link and open a new window if you use HotMail or other frames-based web sites that make opening a link in a new window difficult (or impossible).

BrowseTo requires Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 5.0 or newer.

The author has definitely got a sense of humor. You’ve got to read some of his copy. And, he must be a jazz fan (his site name is straightnochaser.com).

[Marc’s Outlook on Productivity]

Here’s a useful little tool that solves a problem I run into multiple times a day.

ActiveWords wordbase for OneNote.

Fred Zimmerman has created a OneNote ActiveWords wordbase file for ActiveWords Plus. This came about from a conversation Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords and I were having that we sucked Fred into.

The wordbase offers a number of really helpful AW shortcuts including:

• “onsn” — ActiveWord to launch OneNote SideNote
• “onsnip” — ActiveWord to snip selected text from any app and paste it into OneNote — courtesy Buzz Bruggeman and Dennis Kennedy
• “onaudio” — ActiveWord to turn on OneNote audio recording in current page

Nice work Fred! You just made one of my favorite apps even better!

[Marc’s Outlook on Productivity]

Buzz walked me through some of this the other day. I expect I’ll be installing OneNote shortly. For all the productivity I already get out of ActiveWords, I’m always amazed by the tricks that Buzz gets it to do. He chips away at little irritations in the way that Windows can be an invisible drag on productivity and over time turns an out of the box laptop into a highly personalized and tuned information appliance.